Re:Ask HN: How to tell someone you need to rewrite an entire...
by ams6110 on Saturday April 16, 2011 @09:54PM
(#2455374)
I wonder, and this is not an insult, how much experience you have as a developer. I know that for a good five years, maybe more, as a developer in corporate IT I frequently thought that I was dealing with a "very bad" codebase and rewriting seemed like an easier task than trying to understand the current system well enough to make the changes I needed to make.
I was wrong. Every time. Unless the system is quite small and single-purpose, you very likely don't understand the full scope of what it does, why it is written the way it is, which constituencies it serves, all of its interfaces, etc.
The few times I have been involved in rewrites they always took longer than expected, cost more than planned, and ended up with kludgy patches at the last minute as features of the old system that nobody talked about or knew existed suddenly became showstopper must-have requirements. In other words, they turned out like almost any other corporate IT project.
I was wrong. Every time. Unless the system is quite small and single-purpose, you very likely don't understand the full scope of what it does, why it is written the way it is, which constituencies it serves, all of its interfaces, etc.
The few times I have been involved in rewrites they always took longer than expected, cost more than planned, and ended up with kludgy patches at the last minute as features of the old system that nobody talked about or knew existed suddenly became showstopper must-have requirements. In other words, they turned out like almost any other corporate IT project.